The Power of True Conversion by Charles Marsh

Perkins asked me to pick him up around five o'clock in the afternoon. He wanted me to drive him to Yazoo City where he was scheduled to speak at a youth rally. I was a little uneasy about the assignment. Mickey Schwerner's burned-out station wagon was the only image in my head of blacks and whites driving together along country roads in Mississippi. In fact, aside from a few times in high school when I drove a black teammate home after basketball practice, I had never been in the same car with a black person. Perkins's idea was that we would talk on the way up-which was about an hour's drive-and then stop at Shoney's on the ride home for a piece of their famous hot fudge cake.

Five minutes north of the county line, Perkins fell into a deep sleep, his body folding into the space between the seat and the door of the rental car. He was exhausted. And I drove northeast with no map and no conception of where Yazoo City lay in the geography of the Mississippi Delta. I had been there once, I think, to play in a junior high basketball tournament, but that didn't help me now, of course. I was completely lost. But I couldn't bring myself to wake Perkins up. Think about it (and I sure did): here next to me slept-and snored-a black man who, except for the grace of God, had every reason to choke the life out of me. Here was a "modern saint," as the evangelical U. S. senator Mark Hatfield had called him. I knew that just days earlier he had returned from a grueling trip to Haiti, where he had visited slum areas throughout the country, sharing his Christian community development vision with religious leaders and community organizers.